19 January 2012, 6:40

Having been using the 1.4 version for a while, we decided to focus our feedback on minor nuances that could improve Mahara experience considerably.

One of the main uses of Mahara in our University is for interaction between tutors and students, whether informal or for formal assessment.

• One of the issues we have discovered was that search doesn’t work properly, for example when entering the exact name of a student – about 15 names come up, and the student’s name doesn’t even appear first in the search results.
• Another issue is with the shared pages, some tutors have hundreds of pages shared with them and it can be a challenge to find the required submission, unless you know the exact name of the submission. When entering student’s name into the search – it doesn’t come up with the pages they have submitted.
• Additionally, if the feedback left on the page is private, it doesn’t show up that a comment has been left. Thus it could be hard for the tutor to track which submissions have received feedback and which haven’t .
• And finally, another issue commonly raised amongst people using Mahara is the potential to export into word, in particular pages and cvs.

20 January 2012, 23:04

Hello Daniel,

Thank you again for collecting feedback and putting it here.

• As for the search: In 1.5 you can enable "exact search" which will allow you to search for a name and it appearing without all 15 before or after. If you want to search for a display name you will have to put it in as it appears.
• Shared pages: The search is only for the title, description or tags but not for the author of the page.
• Your remark about the comments is an interesting one. If private comments were counted as well, but then you only see 3 instead of 10 that might not be ideal either. Would you have a suggestion of how to handle this?
• Can you please provide more information about the export to a text document and cvs?

Cheers

Kristina

01 April 2012, 19:22

I'm late replying to this: I'm glad the 'exact' potential will be there for 1.5, but in the meantime, since all of our students are tied to a student number in the system, I often get around this search problem by putting a space before their student number. It sounds too simple, but it has worked many times.

02 April 2012, 15:54

Hello Gillian,

Sometimes the small tricks can be quite powerful.

Cheers

Kristina